Image via flixist.com
The thermometer didn’t actually register 157 degrees Fahrenheit in DC that Sunday afternoon. But if you stepped outside for even two minutes, it sure felt like it.
I had made a deal with the Liberian Girl earlier that week to buy brunch on Sunday if she bought movie tickets for a matinee. Neither of us wanted to abandon the air-conditioned apartment. But a deal was a deal. The date was non-negotiable. And it was unclear how long Beasts of the Southern Wild would run at the E Street Cinema.
Four blocks separated the apartment from the Lincoln. I convinced the Liberian Girl to walk it. That was a bad idea. Thankfully, the Lincoln had ice water. And lemonade. And things that would make the lemonade taste like gin.
We took two seats at the end of the bar not far from the kitchen. She ordered chicken and waffles. I asked for flapjacks. And bacon. And macaroni and cheese. They had just run out of bacon. Sausage would have to do. The executive chef emerged from the kitchen to wipe his brow and harass the bartender. The bartender gave it right back to him. The Liberian Girl insinuated herself into the volleying routine and somehow won both of them over. The chef sent out a complimentary basket of muffins.
All of that food, to be honest, was just a little too much for such a hot day. For the Liberian Girl. The fat bastard she allowed to buy her meal had no trouble destroying his flapjacks. And his macaroni and cheese. She stole most of his sausage. To reciprocate, he swiped half a hunk of chicken and two-thirds of a waffle. It was all, they both pronounced, very good.
I paid the bill, and we skated to the cinema–this time via an air-conditioned cab with a fresh newspaper and full candy dish in the back seat. The driver told us a story of sitting in a different theatre many years prior waiting for a film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V to begin. Suddenly, he said, Secret Service agents filled the aisles. Sitting Vice President Dan Quayle wanted to see the flick, too. Who knew?
The Liberian Girl tipped the driver handsomely. “God bless your life,” he said. No cab driver had ever wished either of us such good fortune.
She bought the tickets. I insisted on buying the wine and the popcorn. E Street, you see, is one of those movie theaters that caters to grown-ups. The downside is that seeing a movie there re-calibrates one’s expectations for what a cinema experience should be. There aren’t many things more fundamentally civilized than enjoying a proper drink while sitting in front of a massive screen watching a movie that, one hopes, will be freakin’ excellent.
Image via PortlandMercury.com
There’s enough buzz about Beasts of the Southern Wild to describe it in crudely succinct terms: it’s the one where a little girl and her father struggle to survive extreme weather conditions while living in a strange little island colony just off the New Orleans coast. It’s a fable rooted in some pretty real tragedies.
There’s the obvious: Hurricane Katrina. And the not-so-obvious: the cultural pasteurization of America where every last interesting place is transformed into a pseudo-metropolitan sprawl that meets some odd and oddly defined standard of being “a nice place to live.” Tony Soprano once ranted about that. (Ed. Note: Still searching for that video clip.) I’d like to do so here, but I haven’t moved to New Orleans yet so I’ll save that for a day when I’m better informed. Or, for when I’m simply feeling much more rant-y.
The film is alive. It’s messy. It’s vibrant. It has character. It’s beautiful. And it’s kinda disgusting. You could pick apart some of its technical rawness. But you’d be missing the many, many virtues of that rawness. To begin with: Quvenzhane Wallis.
Who knows what goes on in the mind of a five-year-old making her film debut? She may be too young to grasp the magnitude of the endeavor. But that sounds like a really arrogant assumption. And it’s probably wrong. Any kid who can do what she does to make a character breathe must be wired differently than the rest of us. Imagine: You’ve finally stopped peeing the bed. Your legs still aren’t long enough to touch the ground when you sit at the big people table. When you go to school, it only lasts half a day. And, guess what, you have to help carry a feature-length movie that several big people have bet their lives on. If that were me, I think I’d go back to peeing the bed.
Wallis, you might guess, plays the little girl whose story drives the film. She marches around the little island where she and her father live in time with the unique rhythms of the place. She has a teacher who tells her stories of mythical creatures. She plays with sticks and bugs and whatever else she can find in the wild bush. She lives in a private shack-castle, right next to her father’s shack-castle. She cooks for herself and imagines her absent mother to still be present.
Wallis isn’t the only lead actor making her film debut. Dwight Henry, who plays the father, runs a bakery in New Orleans. That’s his day job. As he steps into the moonlight for the first time, he plays a recalcitrant man who drinks too much and whose body is slowly failing him. He knows how to use his hands. To create. To repair. Or to destroy. Like the daughter, the ghost of the mother haunts the father. The difference being the father knows the full measure of the woman he longs for.
Other creatures inhabit the island the two lead characters call home. None are quite as raw as the little girl and her father. All of them share a touch of the father’s recalcitrance. These aren’t people who consume lazily and thoughtlessly. These are folks who see treasure in trash, and who find a use for everything they can see and touch. As for the things they can’t see, they celebrate those. Except for the weather. The threat of a storm looms as an extinction level event for the island colony. Most of its citizens value their lives over their lifestyles so they flee when the storm finally comes. For the little girl’s father and a few of his friends, the lifestyle equals life. There’s no fleeing that.
So that’s the conflict: the great storm. Or storms. The physical collision of the elements, and the metaphysical longing for the thing one simply cannot fully create (or recreate) even when summoning all the power of one’s mind and one’s hands.
Image via SFGate.com
Beasts of the Southern Wild is a film about making. And it has a pretty remarkable creation story of its own. There’s a creative collective called Court 13 who is responsible for the film’s existence. Writer/director Benh Zeitlin leads its ring(s). A writer from the Fast Company universe interviewed him about the messy little universe he and his friends have lovingly created. I had read it a week or so before the Liberian Girl and I planned our afternoon date. The interview whispered a context to me. Although I wasn’t clear, upon reading it, exactly what it had said.
Once upon a time, I made a movie. A documentary about people who visited a particular URL to form one of the earliest and surprisingly enduring online communities. I didn’t make the movie alone. I harassed some friends to help me bring it to life. We had all connected via that site. And we all faced the same question none of us could comfortably answer: “How do you guys know each other?” In the early days of the Internet–before Facebook, before Myspace, before Friendster even–there were a lot of people like us who were walking in two worlds. We had been created and dropped into one. The other, it seemed, was ours to create.
We all wrestled with the process of making. Or, more to the point, we wrestled with the process of making sense of what we were experiencing online–particularly as it related to “real life.” As my friends and I alternately dashed and plodded through the making of the documentary, the small intersection of the Venn diagram we helped open eventually consumed the diagram itself so the two worlds more or less became the same place. Our movie was less necessary as an explanation tool and morphed into something of an artifact. The greatest thing about it may be the simple fact that we finished it.
But we did finish it. And, if you’re part of the fraternity of makers who’ve bootstrapped your way through a passion project, you understand the magnitude of completion. As I sat in the E Street Cinema holding the Liberian Girl’s hand, Benh Zeitlin’s fable transported me to a place he may not have intended for me to go.
It took me back to the UCLA bookstore where I bought my first book about documentary filmmaking. Back to an all-night edit session in San Francisco where it took four of us to complete the movie’s first trailer. Back to the first interview we did with ?uestlove. Back to the road where I lived for three months snaking around the United States gathering interviews with the talkative heads behind our community’s screen-names. Back to fights with friends over vision, direction and choices about the film. Back to fights with family over choices about things in life that weren’t the film but had somehow bled into it. Back to endless emails and phone calls to secure one last interview with a very busy musician. Back to watching the absolute last and final cut. Back to screening the movie for a room full of people for the first time. Back to opening that box with the first pressing of the DVDs.
Sitting in an E Street theatre as credits rolled on Beasts of the Southern Wild, I imagined the experiences of Benh Zeitlin and Court 13. They finished. They made it. And, I suspect, there’s something about that they may find to be eternally satisfying.
Or maybe not. Our fraternity is an odd one. Some of us make life out of the lifestyle. And some of us flee for more sturdy ground.
